Entrepreneur Magazine, March 2012
An article by Lolita Villa of Entrepreneur Magazine Philippines about Sinag Printing winning the Natasa Prize 2011 in Vienna, Austria.
Not all CSR programs cost an arm and a leg. Take it from this
small printng press in Laguna.
A small business south of Manila owned by a young couple
recently proved that you can undertake a CSR (Corporate Social Resposibility)
program for under P50,000 – and even win an international award in the process.
In
2007, Ruel Landicho, 34, and his wife Raia Dela Peña-Landicho, 32, started
Sinag Publishing and Printing Services, a Calamba, Laguna – based printing
company that specializes in school yearbooks and marketing collaterals.
Sinag
is actually an offshoot of Tambuli Publishing, started by Raia’s father and
known for printing community newspapers since the 1970s. Though growing and
successful, Sinag is still a small outfit run by less than 15 people, using an
old Heidelberg offset press manufactured a hundred years ago.
Which
is why the unassuming Landichos, who started Sinag on a whim, were surprised
when the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers or WAN-IFRA,
awarded them the first Natasa Prize for Printing Plants in the 2011 World Young
Reader Awards for running a series of successful programs that benefited young
journalists in the greater Calabarzon (Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal and
Quezon provinces) area.
How did they do it?
Aiming to “foster a love for writing and journalism in the
youth of our province”, the Landichos launched their first ever Sinag
Journalism Training (SJT) seminar at Calamba’s Central 1 Elementary School in
October 2008.
Raia, a Comparative Literature Major at the University of the Philippines –Diliman,
tapped her former schoolmates as speakers for the event. The couple also
approached the local Department of Education office to have them sponsor the
venue and open the event to both public and private institutions. Local
government officials responded to their solicitations by providing food and
announcement banners for the event. The result: about 1,000 young students
attended the seminar.
Since
then, the couple has organized two more seminars, both of them sponsored and
offered to the students for free.
At what cost?
The Landichos spent less than P30,000.00 for all three
seminars by tapping the resources of like-minded organizations. Raia, a great
fan of social networking sites, admits that Sinag does not even have its own
website (although they are currently working on one), but uses Facebook,
Multiply, Sulit, Blogspot and other free sites to promote the business and the
seminars.
These
sites were how Wan-Ifra executive director Dr. Aralynn McMane discovered them.
McMane saw Sinag as the one that embodied the spirit of the Natasa Award the
best. She contacted the Landichos, who then flew to Vienna, Austria to attend
the 63rd World Newspaper Congress in October last year, to receive
the recognition.
The
Landichos get emotional when asked about this achievemnt – they have never
dreamed that their experimental attempts at business and CSR would let them reap
an international recognition. Raia says: “We are just a small company. But this
has not deterred us from dreaming to do great things for the Community.”
What is the Natasa
Prize?
The Natasa Prize for Printing Plants category of the World
Young reader Awards goes to a newspaper printing plant “that has an effective
educational programme to teach the young about newspaper journalism and about
the importance and fragility of a free press,” according to the WAN-IFRA
website (www.wan-ifra.org)
The
prize was named after the late Nataza Vuckovic Lesendric who, in partnership
with WAN-IFRA and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (Unesco), founded and ran a distribution system and then a printing
plant for the independent press of Siberia under the repressive regime of
longtime president Slobodan Milosevic.
